Disk Busy ;(

[Bong Fleshlight Combo]

When i try to download something, i cant download it. 'cause it says disk busy. How can i disable this thing ?!

[Zombie]

Your HD has nothing to do with Disk Busy. Its steam that has the issue. They need to fix it. It is happing to everyone.

[RiO]

The only reason people see this as an issue is because they haven't measured the actual difference between now and before. In the old situation, if a game had to chance 100 KB of data in one of those huge GB sized packed data files some (actually; many...) games use, then you'd have to redownload that entire GB.

Right now, you only have to download that 100 KB of data as a 'binary diff' and Steam will actively graft it into that huge GB-sized file at the correct spot. This makes the new downloader is a *lot* more efficient with bandwidth.

Yes, the trade-off is it trashes your disk more. No, this is not due to random access. This is because Steam allows background downloads. Background downloads means it cannot risk editing a 'living' file. Instead it copies that file into a secondary location and then makes the modifications there. Then copies the modified file back into place on top of the original as soon as 'things are safe'.

Have you ever witnessed a game stuck on 'Update Required' that, once the update process began seemed to never download anything and would just sit there for a minute or so without download activity? Well; that's because all your files were already updated and ready on your drive. What the updater was actually doing at that point was just copying them back into place and then cleaning up after itself, removing the temporary download files.

The use of the secondary copy also means you can cancel or pause an update mid-flight without your game entering a state of limbo where it is essentially hosed without either a rollback or continuing the update.


If you really dislike the new update process with the "disk busy" and if you're really worried about the additional disk trashing, then petition Valve for configuration flag to disable the temporary working copies. Ofcourse, that would forcibly disable both background downloads and the capability to pause or seemlessly cancel an update and immediately play. But you can't have everything.


The rattling of your disks is not due to expensive random access reads or writes. It's because it's copying files at the max transfer rate using the naive file copy operation built into your OS. A Steam update is about as damaging to your disk as copying over a large batch of home movies or any set of typically large files.

Valve ofcourse could try to improve that. A smoother copying operation that 'streams to disk' in chunks that are more optimized to your disk's own buffers, caches and RPM, is something a lot of bittorrent clients already have implemented. The downside of that? Disk fragmentation.

It's an imperfect world...

[Legendary old man]

Zombieland a écrit :

Your HD has nothing to do with Disk Busy. Its steam that has the issue. They need to fix it. It is happing to everyone.

Bull. Your disk is busy. All you have to do is look at the little flashing light on your computer to tell it is writing to disk.

[TooMeeK]

Well..
On my quite fast (around ~300MB/s seq read/write) RAID0 volume it still takes couple of minutes to prepare Payday's 2 game files as it's reported under Task Manager -> Performance Monitor -> Disk. Memory, CPU - idle. Low response times from volume.
So, the question is: how fast drives have to be to handle well initial download stage?
This has nothing to do with drive's condition, since are all in good state.

Of course I can run Steam just for test on very fast enteprise-class storage to measure it also. But it should go file by file in the background, not hitting whole storage performance, for example: a switch or option in steam as "Use storage subsystem in %: 0 - 100 during downloads" for users. Or just measure storage once as Windows Performance Index doing and then decide in % by user how busy it can be.

[Legendary old man]

When files are being unpacked your i/o is also a major factor.
http://blog.scoutapp.com/articles/2011/02/10/understanding-disk-i-o-when-should-you-be-worried